Renaming and moving files in bulk
Renaming a number of files is one of the tasks we frequently come across. A simple example is when you download photos from your digital camera to your computer you may delete unnecessary files and it causes discontinuous numbering of image files. Sometimes, you may need to rename them with a custom prefix and continuous numbering for filenames. We sometimes use third-party tools for performing rename operations. We can use Bash commands to perform a rename operation in a couple of seconds.
Moving all the files having a particular substring in their filenames (for example, the same prefix for filenames) or with a specific file type to a given directory is another use case we frequently perform. Let's see how to write scripts to perform these kinds of operations.
Getting ready
The rename command helps to change filenames using Perl regular expressions. By combining the commands find, rename, and mv, we can perform a lot of things.
How to do it...
The easiest way...
